Bomb-sniffing Bees

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently made a press announcement that they had trained honey bees to detect explosives.

By simply associating a sugar-water food source with samples of explosives, researchers have learned that they can program a "proboscis extension reflex" (their feeding mouthpart) for the bees within as little as 15 minutes. In one application, trained bees are placed inside a "sniffer box" in a tiny harness which holds their head in front of a video camera. Software detects proboscis activity and alerts operators as necessary.

This promises to provide a far more cost-effective solution for explosives detection than non-biologically based systems.

Bees sense of smell is said to rival that of dogs. Previous research efforts to use bees to detect explosives attempted to use free-flying bees as indicators, which required some method of observing their activities remotely.